I return to the clerk of court’s office on a gray afternoon. The woman at the desk is friendly but brusque.
“Well, I can show you the trial transcripts,” she begins.
“I’ve already seen those.”
“But the photographs are evidence. You can’t see the evidence, not without a court order. It was sealed.”
I stare at her. “When was it sealed?”
“I don’t know, ma’am, but it’s not just free for the viewing. What exactly are you trying to see?” she asks.
“Only the photographs.” I think about what else would be there. Everything I haven’t considered: the plastic bags of evidence taken from the scene, the blankets. Jeremy’s white Fruit of the Loom T-shirt with the holes cut out for the semen samples. His BB gun, with its long brown plastic barrel. How much am I required to see to understand?
I wait. I watch the thoughts move across her face. Her name is in the files. Her signature on every stamped document, over and over again. Everything I am trying to see, she has already seen.
“All right,” she finally says. “You can see the photocopies of the photographs. Mark what you want, and we’ll send you them later.”
She brings out five or six stacks of papers clipped together, each several inches thick. I lift the cover of the top stack and see a black-and-white copy of an aerial photograph. Blotchy woods, dense and thick with black. A few small houses, arranged in a row.
The house at the end is white and bigger than the others. The Lawson house. It is like being shown a photograph of the ghost that has been trailing you. I see it nestled against the thick black web of the woods and I understand instantly why it was so strange that Ricky didn’t get rid of the body. The woods were right there, only a few feet out the back door, dense enough to make a tangled darkness of the page.
I gather myself a stack of paper clips and small Post-it flags and I mark the pages. When I reach the pictures of Lorilei’s son, I flip through them so quickly I register only flashes. The sheen the flash made against his blond hair. The moist bulb of his lower lip.
That night, in my motel room, I pour screw-top wine into a plastic cup and channel-surf stations. The too-sweet red wine blurs my mind, but not enough. The motel room is strangely constructed, with a sitting room I can’t see from the bed. Twice I get up and check it. I am checking to make sure I am alone. I know I am alone. I do not feel alone. I check the closets and try not to think of Jeremy’s body. I check the bathtub. For years, whenever I walked into a bathroom that had a tub in it I would have to peel back the curtain and make sure there wasn’t a dead body in there. After my grandfather’s death, it became, more specifically, his body. Him dead. I felt foolish for the gesture every time, yet I had to check. I had just done so, secretly, in the bathroom at a house where my family was staying, and emerged to see my mother standing there. Sheepish, I told her about this quirk of mine.
She looked at me, stricken. She might have seen a ghost. “When you were a child,” she said slowly, “you found your brother Andy unconscious and blue at the bottom of an empty tub.”
The mind remembers. The mind mixes up. Everything repeats.
The next afternoon, on the plane back to Boston, the clouds through the window are an unrelenting gauze. They seem not beautiful but indecently sticky. I order more wine and gulp it down. The white of the bubble of wet saliva on Jeremy’s lip in the camera’s flash. The plush white ribbing of the cotton sock he chokes on as it spills from his darkened mouth. I turn away from the window and press my eyes closed. I try hard not to imagine what I have invited to follow me home.
*
The process by which the jury is selected—voir dire, from the French for “to speak truth”—is unique for a death penalty case. The jurors must be death-qualified, which means that they must avow that they would theoretically be able to vote for a sentence of death. Clive has successfully petitioned to hold voir dire in New Orleans. People there won’t be as familiar with the case. The selected jurors will then be bused to Lake Charles. Each day, panels of prospective jurors pass a corded microphone back and forth among themselves as the lawyers and Judge Gray ask them questions. The microphone cord becomes a running joke. Clive says that it will strangle him. Gray asks the jurors not to strangle themselves. The joke is strange in its recurrence—its insistence—and in the fact that Jeremy was strangled, a deep score around his neck from the fishing wire. Gray has seen the photographs. So has Clive. Are the photographs haunting them already?
From the start, selection runs into trouble. The New Orleans murder rate is eight times the national average. The first day of voir dire, Gray announces that he’ll make sure they end on time each evening, because he doesn’t want anyone on the streets when the sun begins to set. Nine days in, the prosecutor, Cynthia Killingsworth, comments that it’s the first day since they’ve been in New Orleans that there hasn’t been a murder. Gray corrects her: There was a murder. There’s been a murder every day. One juror’s nephew was involved in two murders. Another’s friend is on death row. A woman’s half brother is serving three consecutive life sentences for murder. She couldn’t impose the death penalty on anyone, she says, because he maintains his innocence and in case that’s true, she wouldn’t want him to die. One man didn’t used to believe in the death penalty, but his best friend of thirty years was found murdered on the street two months ago, and now he’s not sure. He’s just not sure. Another’s brother was murdered. A woman’s daughter’s friend. “They never found out who did it,” she says. A man’s son was murdered at seven. “I sat down here and I got forty years of memories coming back to me,” he says. “I don’t mind coming to do my civic duty, but this one’s really tough for me.”
Because of death qualification, it is arguably not that hard to get off a death penalty jury. You just have to say you couldn’t impose a death sentence, no matter the crime. By a week into voir dire, roughly three-quarters of the prospective jurors are saying they don’t believe in the death penalty. That percentage seems suspect. True, this is liberal New Orleans, but it’s still Louisiana, part of the so-called fry belt—named for its old quickness with the electric chair—and still one of the most active death penalty states in the country.
So when one lady, asked if she could vote to impose death, says, “Oh, no, I couldn’t do that,” a lawyer finally presses her further. “Do you mean to tell me,” the lawyer says, “that if we have the trial and the lawyers present their evidence and you’re convinced on guilt, you could not consider the death penalty?”